BjöRk Ed

“I want the kids to feel like they’re superheroes of sound,” Björk said the other day, at the New York Hall of Science, in Queens. The Icelandic singer and composer, restlessly youthful at the age of forty-six, was rehearsing for a monthlong series of events related to her new project, “Biophilia,” which is part album, part stage spectacle, part iPad-app emporium, part new-instrument laboratory, and part curriculum. It is one of the more ambitious schemes undertaken by a pop artist in recent years, and perhaps the most singular thing about it is that education has been part of the plan from the outset. Since the beginning of February, students from Queens middle schools have been dropping by the Hall of Science to learn scientific and musical concepts side by side, following a “Biophilia” syllabus.

“A few years ago, when I first started making music with touch-screen technology, I felt like I was revisiting my own music classes, back when I was seven or eight,” Björk said, during an Indian-food dinner break with her musicians and Icelandic choristers. “I thought about how certain ideas could have been more fertile, more tactile, if this technology had been around. It was so empowering for me when the touch screen was hooked up to, say, a pipe organ. And I kept thinking about how empowering it would be for a child. We have this instrument called the singing Tesla coil, which makes monster tones from electric bolts. When I wrote my ‘Biophilia’ songs, I chose natural elements that I knew kids would really like. Lightnings! Pendulums! Natural processes that move 3-D, in space. You can relate them to arpeggios, counterpoint, all those musicology things.”

Each track on “Biophilia” includes what Björk calls a “science element” and a “music element.” “Crystalline,” for example, compares crystal formations to flexible structures of songs. “Solstice” likens swinging pendulums to overlapping contrapuntal lines. And “Virus,” whose folk-like melody seems to come from the depths of the centuries, has an unstable, ever-shifting accompaniment that suggests cells subdividing and multiplying. The “teachable” elements are basic, although they sometimes venture into more esoteric zones. “Dark Matter,” a song based on rumbling cluster chords, evokes the secret places of the universe. (A Rutgers astrophysicist joined the “Biophilia” team to elucidate dark-matter theory.)

On a recent afternoon, a group of children—Jiselle, Anthony, Ethan, Michael, Joselyn, and two Andys—gathered in a learning lab at the Hall of Science. They were met by Curver, a jovial, bespectacled Icelandic musician and artist who began running “Biophilia” workshops in Reykjavík last fall. As the kids settled, Curver said, “It usually takes them a couple of days to understand that these apps aren’t like games, where you follow the rules, but creative tools, where you express yourself.” Joining him were a music teacher—a woman who goes by the name Carol C, the lead singer of the Latin-inflected band Si*Sé—and a Hall of Science teacher named Jessica Castillo.

The first song of the day was “Thunderbolt,” which draws a connection between lightning and arpeggios. “In arpeggios, the notes of a chord are played one by one, sometimes in a zigzag pattern,” Carol C explained. “Like lightning in the air.” Castillo fired up a Van de Graaff generator, placed a yellow wig on a couple of the kids, and made the strands of the wig stand on end. “I’m Thor!” one of the Andys said, standing on a crate above the generator and raising his arm imperiously.

The group then walked over to the Great Hall, a soaring, wavy-walled space originally built for the 1964 World’s Fair. (Björk played there earlier this month; she opens at the Roseland Ballroom this week.) Paul Eastman, a member of Björk’s crew, activated the singing Tesla coil, which drives “Thunderbolt.” Curver showed the students how to operate a touch-screen controller, choosing notes for their arpeggios, setting a tempo, and composing melodies on top of them. Purple plasma bolts zapped inside an eight-foot-high cylindrical cage, and the resulting sound waves modulated into organlike blasts.

The kids were duly impressed. “Heart attack!” Anthony exclaimed, when the first bolts passed through the air and a jagged arpeggio resulted. “Duh-duh-duh-DUH,” Michael said, à la Beethoven’s Fifth. Jiselle, the boldest of the group, was the first to try out the device. “Ladies first,” the boys said sardonically, before letting out yelps of “Wooh!” and “Awesome!” Songs in various styles ensued: descending chromatic patterns reminiscent of Bizet’s “Habanera”; Philip Glass-like reiterations of a rising fourth; swirling figures out of Terry Riley’s “A Rainbow in Curved Air.”

As the children went back to the classroom for a lesson in viruses, Jiselle asked Eastman if he spoke to Björk often. Yes, Eastman told her, he discusses the set list with Björk before each show. “Next time you talk to her,” Jiselle said, “tell her a little girl says, ‘Wow!’ ” ♦

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.